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LN still requires periodic on-chain transactions to close and open payment channels. So either these costs are being passed along to the users in El Salvador or the wallet provider is subsidizing it.
One vision is that checking accounts are custodial LN solutions with savings accounts as cold storage. Discussion with the "Bitcoin Beach" people https://stephanlivera.com/episode/279/
Amazingly shortsighted. The primary beneficiaries of this will be organised crime, who will now be able to wash the Bitcoin via El Salvador to convert it to dollars, which they can use to buy trade items and export the profits. The number one export of El Salvador is actually people. If they were concerned about remittance fees they could just set up a bank in the US with low fees, instead of getting kickbacks from O…
Remittances are one of the best use cases for bitcoin; my comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27448744 goes into more details. Bitcoin mining is mostly a subsidy to renewable energy (fossil fuels are too expensive to make fossil-fueled bitcoin mining profitable), so although I could be wrong, I expect it to ameliorate global warming, not worsen it.
This is incoherent. Nothing ties these prices together. If tomorrow the price of BTC goes up 1000x, the price to buy a joule of energy via burning coal doesn't change at all.
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They are using Zap/Strike (Lightning) and zero fees. The phony "fees are $1,000 a tx line" and $10 hyperbole simply show you have no clue what you're talking about when speaking about Bitcoin. Even on chain the past solid week you could send free BTC transactions, or for a couple of cents.
> the past solid week you could send free BTC transactions, or for a couple of cents Why was that? Didn't miners charge for that service?
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They are using Zap/Strike (Lightning) and zero fees. The phony "fees are $1,000 a tx line" and $10 hyperbole simply show you have no clue what you're talking about when speaking about Bitcoin. Even on chain the past solid week you could send free BTC transactions, or for a couple of cents.
I am sorry but what is the point of adopting BTC if vast majority of the transactions are going to be handled by a third party service. Makes no sense to me.
Because they've saturated the technical audience who can do bitcoin without a 3rd party service and now need regular people to shovel money in to keep the prices propped up.
This is the "please buy a single tube of toothpaste from my Quixtar stash" phase.
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Asking as a noob, isn't the whole point of transaction fees to prevent malicious actors from flooding the network with spam. How does lighting networks prevent that from happening and why can't one use a smiliar approach for the actual bitcoin blockchain?
High level answer: Lightning transactions happen off network and only "sync up" once in a while. In a lightning transaction, only the two individuals transacting know that it has happened. But in an on-chain transaction, that info is public.
Amazingly shortsighted. The primary beneficiaries of this will be organised crime, who will now be able to wash the Bitcoin via El Salvador to convert it to dollars, which they can use to buy trade items and export the profits. The number one export of El Salvador is actually people. If they were concerned about remittance fees they could just set up a bank in the US with low fees, instead of getting kickbacks from O…
El Salvador has (and will have) negligible impact on both generation of and popularity of cryptocurrency, so I don't think that argument is very important given the far more pressing matters they have to deal with as a country, and ones they have control over. The point about opening up a bank is interesting though. The amount of money WU is skimming off the top must be a non-negligible percentage of the country's GD…
https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/remittances_percen...
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> The idea that "normal people" will be able to use bitcoin at all ... is laughable. The idea that "normal people" will be able to use cash at all is laughable. The idea that "normal people" will be able to use gold coins at all is laughable. And yet, many use (or used to) and don't need a mommy state to tell them what to do.
I'm all for getting the government out - but cash or gold is way easier to use. If you have a political problem, you need to solve it politically. You can't hack it with a technical solution or politicians and their rich friends will just find a way to use it against you (like it's happening with btc, enjoy limitless tracking and the rich elite profiting from btc as much (if not more) than you) or ban it (like it hap…
Regarding your second argument: Change in the financial system does not happen by itself. You need severe pressure. DeFi has a huge potential to put pressure on the traditional financial markets to make them more accessible to the poor and limit their excesses (monetary inflation).
The government could of course “ban” Bitcoin and DeFi. But since they are decentralized it can’t make them really disappear — only more cumbersome to get into (and out of), for example, by closing down centralized exchanges. But the government can’t really prevent you to meet a “dealer” cashing in/out on your cryptos.
I'm so surprised.
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Why would somebody who doesn't have a bank account be more capable of using a provider on the lightning network?
You just need a phone, that's it. Banking requires all the infrastructure, etc.
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I personally think the day the digital US dollar is developed … The digital US dollar is pretty much in use already, or do you think your bank has anything physical resembling the number on your account?
The bank does hold a fraction of your deposits, as our banking in the US is fractional reserve banking. This has been the case for quite some time, and isn't really the same thing as digital currency, even if we transact digitally.
In reality, they will accept your deposit/loan (as long as it makes business sense) with no regard for how many notes they have lying around. If that puts them over the edge of the fractional requirements, they'll just go to the Fed/Treasury, who will swing their wand and write in additional (digital) reserves for the bank.
It is mainly all digital at this point.